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Museum of the American Cocktail prepares for move to Central City

The new home of both the Southern Food and Beverage museum and the Museum of the American Cocktail, shown here in an artists' rendering, will include a restaurant and an exhibit on the food of each of the Southern states.
(Photo by The Times-Picayune archive)

Dale DeGroff almost single handedly resurrected classic cocktails in the 1980s at New York's Rainbow Room. Most in the know would call him America's greatest living bartender. He also serves as the president of the Museum of the American Cocktail. It was that official role which brought him to New Orleans last week, but his task was far from glamorous. DeGroff, along with other museum board members and local volunteers, packed up MOTAC's collection for the move to its new home on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard.

For the last five years, MOTAC has been housed inside the Southern Food and Beverage Museum at the Riverwalk mall. When the cocktail museum reopens next spring, it will have an even closer relationship to SoFAB. The cocktail exhibits that touch on the South will be integrated into the food museum's collection. More of the cocktail collection will be displayed, including bottles and memorabilia from the 21st century.

The operations of the two museums will also be integrated. Liz Williams, director of SoFAB, will assume that same position for MOTAC.

"We decided to throw our lot in with Liz," DeGroff said, "and she's happy about it and we're happy about it."

The new combination of SoFAB and MOTAC will include a restaurant led by chef Ryan Hughes, most recently at Uptown's Johnny V's. The restaurant, appropriately enough, will have a bar, and not just any bar. The gorgeous wooden bar that once stood at Brunning's and that SoFAB fished from Lake Pontchartrain will be fully restored and put back into service. DeGroff is designing the back of the bar to meet the standards of modern cocktail makers.

This is not the first time DeGroff has packed up the cocktail museum's exhibits. After the levees failed in 2005, DeGroff and the museum's curator Ted Haigh slipped into New Orleans as soon as they could. They drove the collection to Las Vegas, where it found a temporary home in the Commander's Palace at the Aladdin hotel. DeGroff, though, said that the collection's days of traveling are over.

"This is going to be our home forever," he said. "We're all realizing that the city is behind us. NORA is behind this neighborhood. We've been at the mercy of landlords and largesse, and we don't want to be that way anymore. We want to have a home."

NOTE: Story has been updated to reflected that SoFAB and MOTAC are scheduled to reopen in the "spring," according to director Liz Williams.